Meeting shoppers right where they are. This principle is at the core of ShopLocal’s latest product innovation – the Weekly Ad Facebook App.
Instead of always trying to push and pull user to a specific destination site (e.g., retailer.com), smart retailer today are building out rich and inviting socially enabled experiences within the areas of the web that users spend most of their time within – namely portals and social sites.
Since Facebook is clearly the largest social site in the world with over 350 active users (see the rest of their insane stats below), making sure any given retailer’s brand is well represented within this massive ecosystem is now becoming a requirement.
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- More than 35 million users update their status each day
- More than 55 million status updates posted each day
- More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
- More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
- More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
- Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
- The US represents about 30% of total users
So why add weekly ad content (or any other store promotional or deal content for that matter) to a Facebook fan page? The answer is simple. To attract and retain “fans”, retailers must meet the needs of these shoppers. One of these key needs is to get something in return for their action of becoming a retailer’s “fan”. Namely deals, discounts and coupons. There is a certain social contract at play and it needs to be upheld. The weekly ad is a great source of localized promotions and deals that exactly meets the expectation that fans have.
“When a 1,000 “connected consumers” where surveyed in late 2009 about their digital habits and attitudes towards social media marketing, they found that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users” – recent Razorfish study
So what makes up ShopLocal’s Weekly Ad Facebook App anyways? Here are a few of the key features:
- Integration of common social Facebook features such as:
- Ability to browse localized weekly ad content by both categories and brands and sort the results of these by:
- Popularity
- Item Title
- Sale End Date
- Price
- Rich metrics of all of the user actions
- Multi-channel capabilities that enable retailers to drive traffic either back to their regular weekly ad site and/or retailer.com site
- Geo-target user location identification process that seamlessly determines the user’s nearest store location. It also offers the user a method for changing their system-derived location to a new one at any time
- View an item detail layer complete with the option to view a larger item image
Important Note: This finished, private Facebook app was not paid, approved or directed by Kohl’s. Rather Kohl’s circular content was merely selected to build and test around by the ShopLocal product development team due to its representative nature. This weekly ad Facebook app demo is just so be an example of what is possible for any given retailer. If you would like access to this private beta, all you need to do is simply become “my friend” on Facebook and I will set you up so that you can view this amazing demo app.
This is the "splash" page where the entire weekly ad experience begins. Facebook currently has a really dumb policy in place that prohibits a Flash movie from auto-running. Instead they force a rule that requires that the user to click to activate the flash experience. So this is the ONLY reason why this splash page exists.
Once the user clears the initial hurdle of activating the flash movie, the weekly ad experience comes to life. Right now, the beta app starts with all users viewing the most popular products overall, across all brands and categories.
If a user wants to more details on specific offer, a simple item detail screen is shown which allows the user to potentially buy the item online (at retailer.com), share the item as a link post with their Facebook friends or post a comment. In this case, the user is attempting to leave a comment on a specific item.
Since this user has never interacted with the weekly ad app before, there is a required and Facebook controlled popup that the user must grant the weekly ad app access to some of the personal information. This is a very standard popup that happens in nearly all Facebook apps. But all the same, it is hurdle #2 that Facebook forces us all to jump over.
Once the user has granted the weekly ad app access to their profile information, the comment can be posted. Notice for example the thumbnail image of the user now appears vs. the anonymous user image.
As a nice little feature, within the item detail area for an item, a larger image view is easily accessible.
As an alternate to browsing by category (which is the default method), the user can also choose to browse by brands at any time.
If a user decides that they want to share a specific item of interest as a "link" with their Facebook friends, they can very easily do so from within the weekly ad app. They can even write a comment to help provide some context of why they are sharing this "link".
And finally, here is how a "link" that is shared appears on the user's own wall. This is the #1 action that can cause viral spread of a weekly ad offer, since now all of the user's friends are now going to see this story within their news feed and be able to like, comment and re-share it.
Spreezio, the “priceline of local shopping”, has recently launched a great beta site in which all of the local deal and sale content is being sourced directly from ShopLocal via our latest API – SCRAPI. Spreezio calls this location-based personalized shopping. What I call it is a strong, unique and focused vision that really drives at simplicity and easy of use. Look at it this way, ShopLocal.com and Spreezio both share the exact same underlying data set. However one site is very feature rich, complex and somewhat complicated at points (e.g., ShopLocal.com) while the other site is nearly featureless, stark and simple (e.g, Spreezio.com). It really is exciting to see how a fresh set of eyes (and brains) can tackle the same problem and come up with such a different answer.
The initial success metrics that Spreezio has been able to generate are very promising, with nearly one out of every 4 unique site visitors “converting” which equates to claiming at least one deal. Granted the traffic to the site is still small, but if its a good mousetrap, that can easily be solved.
The entire Spreezio user interface is focused on two things. The keyword search box and the level of desired discount that the user desires. All of this happens within the large red tag area on the homepage.
Once a user has selected a geo-location and search radius, a percentage off discount amount and entered the type of item they are interested in, the real behind the scenes magic happens (eg all sorts of filtering/matching/meta data extraction, etc). Spreezio looks at the entire ShopLocal data set and only pulls back the exact deals that meet this unique set of user defined criteria.
Once a user has narrowed in their search on a specific item of interest, the user is asked to claim the deal. Entailed within this step is learning the name and location of the retailer that is offering the deal as well as some additional product details.
There is also a lot of other great things to look forward to from Spreezio in the near term including:
- Launching an iPhone application that packs up the functionality contained within the browser based version and jams it into a nifty little mobile app.
- Integrating Google Maps into the site to better visual depict the local nature of the deals that were found that meet the user’s search criteria.
- Adding a viral spread loop that will enable a user to invite their friends to join in on the deal that they found, socially powered of course.
The Home Depot recently joined the ranks of other top retailers to launch their own branded iPhone app. It’s a version 1 type release, but from what I know there is a lot planned in the future to really rev up this app. However within this initial version, the THD localized weekly ad content is included (and powered via the ShopLocal SmartDelivery API). The notable feature here is how the weekly ad content is connected to a “list” concept. This creates a useful digital – to – real world shopping tool that users can take advantage of to help capture and plan upcoming in-store shopping visits.
This is the app's start up splash screen
This is the main default landing screen
Once a user selects the "Shop" tab, this is what the user sees next
If a user selects "Weekly Ad", this is the next screen that appears with a list of current categories
Once a specific weekly ad category is selected, a results set is returned of on sale products
Once a specific product is selected, an item detail screen appears with two calls action - add to a wish list OR add to a shopping list
Receiving customer feedback is such a blessing. When real users take the time to tell you what needs to be improved, it really helps make the best product possible. Within the iTunes App Store, this is exactly what happens every day for the over 100,000 live iPhone apps.
Specifically for the Kohl’s Weekly Ad & Store Finder app, the 11 comments and 417 ratings (3 star average and trending upwards) that users have left have directly impacted the app. For example, users early on where getting confused on how to select a specific weekly ad and then how to browse through all the pages. The team took that feedback and added back and next buttons to address this usability issue.
Within the main screen, easy to use previous and next buttons have been added as well as paging info and helpful on screen tip.
Within the browse by brands and department tabs, a keyword search box and a handy jump-to a specific letter has been added.
Version 1.02 is now live and contains the following enhancements:
- Search for on sale offers by keyword(s) within the brand and category screens
- Jump to a specific brand or category value within a newly added, A – through – Z right hand short cut element to reduce screen scrolling, especially through the longer list of brand names that are on sale currently
- Fixed a bug that caused the user’s current location not to be stored and used to find nearby store Kohl’s locations
- Resolved a pesky bug within browse by brand that was keeping all results from appearing
- Enhanced the way users can browse through all available promotion front covers by adding previous and next buttons
- Enhanced the way users can browse through all the pages that make up a specific promotion by adding previous and next buttons
- Inserted some useful on screen tips that prompt users to double tap a specific promotion front cover to the view the rest of the pages of that ad
- Added support to double-tap to zoom back out to a normal level of zoom from a promotion page image that had been previously zoomed in to (by multi-touch pinching)
The wait is over. The Kohl’s Weekly Ad & Store Finder iPhone / iPod Touch application is now live within the Apple iTunes App Store. The ShopLocal team has been working on this for months and it’s great to finally get this live for the general public (thanks Apple for working the weekend and pushing this live last Saturday 10/31).
The team is also excited to see that a good chunk of people have already downloaded the app, given that no promotion has occurred yet, including a few outside of the U.S. (not sure why though?). It will be fun to see this app’s download footprint grow in the coming days, especial within the crowded Lifestyles iTunes app category. It’s one of those things that you really don’t exactly know how your baby (um, I mean app) will be received by the world.
It’s a free download so please download and check it out. Tell us what you think by leaving feedback within iTunes or rating the app there as well.
Available now, the free Kohl's Weekly Ad & Store Finder application
Within this iPhone app, there are four main features and content views which are browse by:
- Weekly Ad Page: Users can browse through all the active weekly ads for their current store location and then can select a specific promotion to view all of the circular pages one at a time
- Brands: App users can filter all of the current on sale deals by a specific brand such as Nike or Dockers
- Categories (called Offers in the app): Allows consumers to select a specific category of interest such as Girl’s Shoes and to only view those applicable deals that are live right now for their current store location
- Nearby Kohl’s Store Locations: Shoppers can use their current location to pull up a list of Kohl’s stores that are close by, as well as directly call the local store or view the store’s location within a Google map
Here is a collage of many of the different views and slices of weekly ad content that is exposed by this native iPhone app that is built around the best local deals that are available at local Kohl's stores across the U.S.
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(4.33 out of 5)
(4.00 out of 5)
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